Free Muscle Memory by William G. Tapply Page B

Gretchen. Tell her how bad I feel that she had to…”
    “I will.” Conley held out his hand to me. “Good to meet you, Brady. See you tonight.”
    We shook hands, and then he left.
    I turned to Mick. “Get up. We’ve got things to do.”
    He lifted himself onto one elbow. “I don’t feel like doing a damn thing, Brady.”
    “I want to get this place cleaned up, and I don’t intend to do it by myself.”
    “Oh, fuck the place.”
    I took off my jacket and draped it over the back of the chair. I rolled up my cuffs as I headed for the kitchen. “Get your ass out here,” I said. “This is a dump.”
    I started moving the dirty dishes from the table to the sink. A minute later Mick appeared in the doorway. “My wife’s dead and you want to clean up the kitchen?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Right now, that’s exactly what I want to do.”
    He frowned at me, then shrugged. “You rather wash or dry?”
    An hour later we had the dishes all washed and put away and a fresh pot of coffee brewing.
    On our way back into the living room, Mick paused at the TV. He bent over and tapped the goldfish bowl with his fingernail. The blue fish tilted its face to the top of the water.
    Mick turned to me. “Erin gave him to me when I moved in here. To keep me company, she said. My daughter.”
    I smiled.
    “I call him Neely. Named him after Cam Neely. Helluva hockey player, Neely. I ran into him a couple times at Skeeter’s. Would’ve had a great career, weren’t for bad wheels.”
    “He had a pretty good career as it was,” I said. “But I don’t exactly get the connection. A blue fish and Cam Neely?”
    Mick shrugged. “No connection. Good name for a fish, that’s all.” He picked up the little fish food shaker and sprinkled some onto the water. Neely began to gobble the flakes off the surface. He reminded me of a trout sipping mayfly spinners off a slow-moving stream.
    Mick tapped the bowl again, smiled, then slouched into one of the chairs. I sat on the sofa.
    He looked at me and spread his hands. “Okay, so the dump’s cleaned up and the goldfish is fed. So what’s the point?”
    “The point,” I said, “is that you’ve got to live your life. We can’t do anything about what happened. It couldn’t be more tragic, but it’s done. I know you’ve got to mourn Kaye, and you should. But you’ve still got to eat and take care of yourself and get through the days.”
    “I really don’t want to do anything,” he said. “I just want to go to bed and stay there.”
    “Sure,” I said. “It was a late night.”
    “I mean, like forever.”
    “What good would that do?”
    “What harm?”
    “Look, Mick,” I said. “Somebody murdered Kaye. It wasn’t you, okay, but it was somebody. Now aside from the fact that I’d just as soon you weren’t convicted of it, I think both of us would like it best if the actual murderer was found. Don’t you want that?”
    He cocked his head and frowned at me as if that were a new idea. Then he nodded. “Well, sure. God damn right I do.”
    “Here’s what I think, then,” I said. “I know Horowitz. He’s a good cop. One of the best, actually. But he’s seen a helluva lot of homicides. To you, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened. To Horowitz, it’s just one more in a long string of tragedies that he’s had to investigate. Want to know something?”
    “What?”
    “Probably three-quarters of the cases Horowitz investigates are domestics. Husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, ex-spouses, children. Now I know Horowitz is open-minded, fair, and thorough. He’s not likely to cave in to political or media pressure. But—”
    “But he’s got me,” said Mick.
    I nodded. “Objectively, you’re a great suspect, Mick. You’ve got no alibi for Sunday evening, you were in the process of getting divorced and probably cleaned out financially, you were upset with Kaye, and your behavior at Skeeter’s last night was—well, it was bizarre, to say the